Insight
AI Impact on Design Roles
"Learn to design with AI" gets passed around like it's one skill. I think it's four different jobs, and only the first one is becoming something every designer is expected to do.
The one skill everyone means
What most people mean by "designing with AI" is a single skill: a designer driving the tools to produce the work faster. Five layouts, a clickable prototype, the docs — all in an afternoon. One new rung on the old ladder.
Actually four crafts
The phrase hides four different jobs, each with a different user: designing with the model to produce the work, designing the product where a person and the model collaborate, designing for the agents that call your software, and designing the model's own behavior.
The waterline rises
Driving the tools is sinking below the line into table stakes — expected of everyone, an advantage for no one. What lifts a designer above it is the other three: shaping AI-native products, the systems agents read, and the model's own behavior.
For most of my career the job had a clear center: I made the screen. A producer needed a renewals dashboard, so I spent two or three days in Figma, drawing the tables, laying out the flow, wiring a prototype. The craft was in how well I made that thing. When people started saying "design with AI", that's what they meant. The same job, faster. Generate five dashboards instead of drawing one.
But faster at making screens is the smallest thing AI did to my work. Under that one phrase there are four different jobs. Designing with the model: the tool skill, the one everyone means. Designing the product where the user works next to the model, a back-and-forth instead of a screen. Designing for the model, when the user isn't a person but an agent calling your software, and the interface is a contract. And designing the model itself: which documents it looks at first, when it says it's unsure, when it asks the broker and when it just goes ahead.
Only the first one is becoming normal. Driving the tools is turning into something every designer is expected to do, the way knowing Figma was. A floor, not an edge. The other three are where I think the role is actually splitting. They ask you to shape products, systems and behaviour that didn't exist to be designed a few years ago, and most of us, me included, are still mostly in the first one.
I'm trying to spend more of my week in the other three, and it's slow.
Making the screens is the floor now. I'd rather be in the rest of it.